The Mekkanine School of Street Art

We are starting 2011 off with a creative bang of enormous mekkanitude!

On January 31st, The Mekkanine School of Street Art will open at Street Mekka. Mekkanine is the brainchild of StreetMekka director Mikkel Gjelstrup, DJ Schack, and yours truly, Juse One. Everyone in the StreetMekka Crew and our extended fam in GAM3 are overjoyed and excited about this innovative new project. During the first semester at The Mekkanine, I will be teaching 5 unique classes designed to endow and encourage aspiring street artists, graffiti writers, street poets and filmmakers with a plenitude of knowlege and training:

The Basic Training course is just what it sounds like – the fundamentals of visual art. This is the starting point for all artists, and it is especially crucial for street artists to have a solid grasp on the basics.

Once you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to take it the streets. Street Art 101 is a detailed training course in techniques and media used in street art. Stencils, printmaking, and wheatpaste, just to name a few, will be covered and practiced extensively in this course.

Letter Science is all about graffiti. Based tightly on blackbook work, students will be exposed to the full gamut of letter styles, and learn every facet of writing graffiti, from handstyles to full productions. Toys are not only welcomed, but encouraged to take this course to develop their skills.

For the aspiring MC’s and poets out there, Spoken Word will provide a tight knit community oriented learning experience based on the performance and elocution of poetry and verbal expression. Whether you wish to speak eloquently like Michael Eric Dyson, write phenomenally beautiful poems like Maya Angelou, or drop hard hitting punchline rhymes like Nas, taking the Spoken Word course can jumpstart your journey to poetic brilliance.

With 21st century in mind, the Digital Media course focuses on the vital elements of audiovisual media production, covering in detail the technical aspects of shooting and editing video. Anyone can upload a video to YouTube, but very few YouTube videos reach a high quality standard of production. Digital Media will give students the tools and training to their make media creations into works of digital art.

I am genuinely proud and tremendously excited to begin our first semester of classes at The Mekkanine School of Street Art. As the year progresses, I will be chronicling the happenings within Mekkanine and keeping everyone posted on the events and exhibitions we will be planning with our students this year at Street Mekka.

If you are interested in the classes offered at The Mekkanine School of Art or would like to be involved in the school’s activities, please visit the StreetMekka website at http://www.streetmekka.dk/mekka9.